Live Play Data

Birthday Escape

· Sorcery · The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR)

Live Inclusion

Buy on TCGplayer

Times Brought

454

Decks Running

213

Median Cast Turn

Drawn → Played

75%

Format

Multiplayer 1v1

First-cast turn

n=95

15%

16%

13%

37%

T6-9

T10+

Median 5 P25 3 · P75 7 · max 14

On curve 4% (4 / 95 cast on T1) Cast same turn as drawn 45%

The "good card" funnel

455 brought · 192 players

Brought to game

455

Ever drawn

126

Reached battlefield

Still on board at game end

≥ -5.3pp

Players who cast this card win 25% of the time (n=82) , vs 21% when it never left the library (n=267).

When players drew this card but left it in hand, they won 24% (n=28).

Read this as correlation, not as the card's contribution. Casting a card means you lived long enough to cast it, so this gap widens with mana value across every card we track.

Observed gap +4.3pp; 95% confidence interval -5.3pp to +13.9pp. Correlational, not causal: powerful payoffs also get cast more often in games you are already winning.

Final zone distribution

141 instances

4.3%

Library

2.8%

Battlefield

68.1%

Graveyard

12.1%

Exile

Commanders that played this card

in tracked games

1 Sauron, the Dark Lord 93 decks
2 Lord of the Nazgûl 52 decks
3 Massimo, the Magician 11 decks
4 Bilbo, Thief in the Night 5 decks
5 Galadriel of Lothlórien 5 decks
6 Aragorn, the Uniter 2 decks
7 Avatar Aang // Aang, Master of Elements 2 decks
8 Bilbo, Retired Burglar 2 decks
9 Etrata, Deadly Fugitive 2 decks
10 Gandalf of the Secret Fire 2 decks

Card text

Birthday Escape

Sorcery

Draw a card. The Ring tempts you.

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LTR) · Common · Illustrated by David Álvarez

Frequently Asked

Why isn't there more data on this card?

Playgroup Live collects per-card gameplay data from real Commander games. Play counts appear once a card reaches 100 tracked games, and the full charts need a sample of at least 25 observed games that is not dominated by a single pilot. Until this card clears those bars you're seeing only the basic counts. Stats refresh nightly.

How is Playgroup Live card data collected?

Players using Playgroup Live import their decklists before a game and log card actions as they play. Each cast, zone change, and resolution is recorded as a real game event. Stats on this site are computed from those events, not from decklist scrapes or theorycrafting. Playgroup has recorded 740,000+ Commander games overall, and this card-level play data comes from the Playgroup Live seats playing virtual cards, a subset of that corpus.